Event 4710: IPsec Services was disabled.

Adversaries may maliciously modify components of a victim environment in order to hinder or disable defensive mechanisms. This not only involves impairing preventative defenses, such as firewalls and anti-virus, but also detection capabilities that defenders can use to audit activity and identify malicious behavior. This may also span both native defenses as well as supplemental capabilities installed by users and administrators. Adversaries may also impair routine operations that contribute to defensive hygiene, such as blocking users from logging out, preventing a system from shutting down, or disabling or modifying the update process. Adversaries could also target event aggregation and analysis mechanisms, or otherwise disrupt these procedures by altering other system components. These restrictions can further enable malicious operations as well as the continued propagation of incidents.(Citation: Google Cloud Mandiant UNC3886 2024)(Citation: Emotet shutdown)

Adversaries may disable or modify a firewall within a cloud environment to bypass controls that limit access to cloud resources. Cloud firewalls are separate from system firewalls that are described in [Disable or Modify System Firewall](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1562/004). Cloud environments typically utilize restrictive security groups and firewall rules that only allow network activity from trusted IP addresses via expected ports and protocols. An adversary with appropriate permissions may introduce new firewall rules or policies to allow access into a victim cloud environment and/or move laterally from the cloud control plane to the data plane. For example, an adversary may use a script or utility that creates new ingress rules in existing security groups (or creates new security groups entirely) to allow any TCP/IP connectivity to a cloud-hosted instance.(Citation: Palo Alto Unit 42 Compromised Cloud Compute Credentials 2022) They may also remove networking limitations to support traffic associated with malicious activity (such as cryptomining).(Citation: Expel IO Evil in AWS)(Citation: Palo Alto Unit 42 Compromised Cloud Compute Credentials 2022) Modifying or disabling a cloud firewall may enable adversary C2 communications, lateral movement, and/or data exfiltration that would otherwise not be allowed. It may also be used to open up resources for [Brute Force](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1110) or [Endpoint Denial of Service](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1499).